The most depressing element of the book, however, is Firmin’s sheer helplessness in the face of his addiction. But there are some intensely wonderful descriptions of the effect of booze: Firmin feels “the fire of the tequila run down his spine like lightning striking a tree which thereupon, miraculously, blossoms.” Over the course of the day, Firmin (aided and abetted by his staggeringly intense alcoholism) destroys his last chances of reuniting with his wife, who loves him and whom he loves, and ends up being killed (not really a spoiler, since the first chapter makes it quite clear) in an altercation with Fascist thugs at a bar. His estranged wife, Yvonne, returns to him after spending a year away, and his half-brother Hugh arrives in town on the same day–the Day of the Dead, a Mexican holiday for the remembrance of family members and loved ones who have died.

The main character is an ex-British Consul in Mexico named Geoffrey Firmin. I didn’t discover Ackerley’s compendium before reading, but I suspect that when I read again with the Companion, a lot of things will be more clear.ĭespite being tricky, Under the Volcano is strangely gratifying for a number of reasons, one of which is that the craziness of the prose works to mirror the degeneration that alcoholism produces in the brain. Think of it as a bunch of hypertextual footnotes–the one thing that most editors of Lowry’s novel, contemporary as it is, generally eschew. That said, it also keeps cropping up on Best-Novels-of-the-20th-Century and Best-Novels-Ever-Ever-Ever lists, so I figured it had to have something going for it, and bought it at the Gloucester Green bookstall intending to find out what that was.Īn excellent strategy for reading this, by the way, is to use Chris Ackerley’s online and illustrated Companion to Under the Volcano. It’s also quite stylistically tricky (which is why it took me nearly a week to read it, despite it only being about 375 pages). I’ve just finished reading Under the Volcano, and I have to say it’s one of the most immersive fictional treatments of alcoholism I’ve ever read. April 2023: superlatives for the rest of it.Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Jacobs.The Great Reread, #6: Annihilation, by Jeff VanderMeer.May 2023: superlatives for the rest of it.

Malcolm lowry books